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The Australian Aborigines, the City and the 1988 Bicentennial

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The Australian Aborigines, the City and the 1988 Bicentennial Kunapipi Volume 6 Issue 1 Article 11 1984 Bury me behind the Mountains: the Australian Aborigines, the City and the 1988 Bicentennial Peter Quartermaine Follow this and additional works at: https://ro.uow.edu.au/kunapipi Part of the Arts and Humanities Commons Recommended Citation Quartermaine, Peter, Bury me behind the Mountains: the Australian Aborigines, the City and the 1988 Bicentennial, Kunapipi, 6(1), 1984. Available at:https://ro.uow.edu.au/kunapipi/vol6/iss1/11 Research Online is the open access institutional repository for the University of Wollongong. For further information contact the UOW Library: [email protected] Bury me behind the Mountains: the Australian Aborigines, the City and the 1988 Bicentennial Abstract On 16 May 1871 the Illustrated Australian News reproduced an engraving illustrating ‘A Surgeon’s Hut in the Bush’. The accompanying text observed that Victoria still retained ‘in its bush life, photographs, so to speak, of the manners and customs which prevailed during the period when the gold fever was raging at its height.1 The writer commented on the fact that the difference between such ‘unpretending habitations’ and ‘the princely mansions in Collins Street East’ afforded ‘a vivid mental panorama of the gigantic strides Victoria has made during the last twenty years’. It is easy to deride such naive perceptions of time and change. Writing 101 years later in Punch, Stephen Toulmin (an Englishman) declared that ‘any self- respecting people must find it embarrassing to possess a national history less than five centuries old’.2 He was writing of America but his assumptions can also be applied to Australia, and especially so as its Bicentennial year of 1988 approaches. This essay attempts to throw some light on what meanings 1988 might have for Australians by examining attitudes to the past and the present expressed by Australian city-dwellers in the period leading up to 1888. This journal article is available in Kunapipi: https://ro.uow.edu.au/kunapipi/vol6/iss1/11 PETER QUARTERMAINE Bury me behind the Mountains: the Australian Aborigines, the City and the 1988 Bicentennial On 16 May 1871 the Illustrated Australian News reproduced an engraving illustrating ‘A Surgeon’s Hut in the Bush’. The accompanying text observed that Victoria still retained ‘in its bush life, photographs, so to speak, of the manners and customs which prevailed during the period when the gold fever was raging at its height.1 The writer commented on the fact that the difference between such ‘unpretending habitations’ and ‘the princely mansions in Collins Street East’ afforded ‘a vivid mental panorama of the gigantic strides Victoria has made during the last twenty years’. It is easy to deride such naive perceptions of time and change. Writing 101 years later in Punch, Stephen Toulmin (an Englishman) declared that ‘any self-respecting people must find it embarrassing to possess a national history less than five centuries old’.2 He was writing of America but his assumptions can also be applied to Australia, and especially so as its Bicentennial year of 1988 approaches. This essay attempts to throw some light on what meanings 1988 might have for Aus­ tralians by examining attitudes to the past and the present expressed by Australian city-dwellers in the period leading up to 1888. Such a procedure may seem perverse, but Ian Turner once wisely observed that ‘to investigate dreams about the future is just another way of studying past and present reality’.3 He also suggested that ‘a law of diminishing returns’ applies to the celebration of national anniversaries. Geoffrey Blainey argued in 1980 that Australians have been ‘slow to realize that the land has had at least two separate histories, and that the history which began with the raising of the British flag represents, at most, a fragment’ .4 In his Boyer Lectures for the ABC that same year Bernard Smith emphasised that 1988 was ‘an important date in the history of black and white alike in this country, though for different reasons’. He expressed the fear that ‘only a major event like the coming 30 ‘A Surgeon’s Hut in the Bush.’ Illustrated Australian News, 16 May 1871, p.4. National Library of Australia, Canberra. together of black and white in the ratification of ... an historic treaty Lon Aboriginal sovereign rights] could prevent the bicentennial from being seen by the Aborigines as ‘the whites celebrating 200 years of oppression’. Blainey had described the meeting between the British and the Abor­ igines as a confrontation between ‘the first industrial nation of the world and the last continent of nomads’,6 and the conflicting priorities of the two civilizations remain the chief reason why Aboriginal culture still does not feature in the felt history of most white Australians.7 The invading imperialistic culture in Australia valued material artefacts and visible organizational ability, not only a civic sense but also (as early New Zealand respect for the Maoris showed) a certain military spirit. Aus­ tralian Aboriginal culture offered no such checks to the spirit of free enterprise and ‘progress’; ‘the Australians of the late nineteenth century looked on the cities that they had built, and found them good.’ Bruce Dawe once observed that it was ‘an excess of virtue’ that produced suburbia, ‘the desire of man not to be a wanderer on the face of the earth but to have a kingdom of his own’; such intimations of the spiritual possibilities of suburbia have not featured largely in Australian culture, however. Yet from the beginning the city was the everyday landscape of most Australians, as it still is today. This unchanging fact helps to explain both an enduring imaginative interest (of which films provide a recent example) in the Bush, and the remoteness of that same Bush (including Aboriginal culture) from most Australian life. It is significant rather than merely coincidental, then, that at about the time that the now-deserted banks of Ophir Creek, New South Wales, were echoing to the cries of excited prospectors, crowds from all over Europe were thronging the Crystal Palace in Hyde Park for the 1851 Great Exhibition of Art and Industry. From gold came ‘the high urbanization which is characteristic of Australia’,10 but from London came the invest­ ment and the technology that made such urbanization possible. In Aus­ tralian literature and art the goldminer became a heroic part of the national legend, but in economic terms he was always destined to be a small cog in an urban-centred, multinational machine. While the early rushes lasted the digger could assume the role of a bold individualist (and often was) but as deeper leads required capital investment in the sophisti­ cated technology displayed at the London Exhibition the Australian gold­ miner, like other labourers all over the empire, worked for wages in a structure where fortunes were made only in stocks and shares. It is a situation that has changed little; RTZ still features prominently in any Australian landscape, for industrialists and investors, if not for artists.11 32 The fifty years from the excitement in Ophir Creek to the opening of the first Federal Parliament in 1901 saw great artistic activity in Aus­ tralia, and not least among photographers. The industrial processes of early photography bore witness to urban technology and resources as clearly as the Polaroid instant-print camera does today. Equally, those very processes were, from the start, applied not only to recording the growing cityscape but also to surveying and ‘capturing’ those unsettled aspects of the continent which simultaneously threatened and fascinated the city dweller.12 Even at the time of the gold rushes, some Australians were aware of how quickly their surroundings were changing, and saw photography as the best way of fixing a vanishing past. ‘What the contemporary observer sees is not necessarily the truth, but the historian neglects it at his peril ';1 looking at the neat late eighteenth-century settlements depicted in Thomas Watling’s paintings, Bernard Smith has asked, ‘I wonder what they really looked like?’14 Photography is the only record of what the contemporary observer saw, of what things really looked like, until the first Australian newsreel recorded the Melbourne Cup of 1896. Painting presented a more selective vision of Australia. In a book published in 1916, one year before his death, the painter Fred McCubbin sought to trace the debt of later Australian artists to what he termed the early ‘pioneer pictures’ of S.T. Gill, Nicolas Chevalier, Eugen Von Guerard, and others.15 In doing so he drew a distinction between such pictures of ‘nature in her grander rather than in her homely moods’ and the images which he saw as having the greatest appeal and power for Australians. The early Australian artists, McCubbin felt, ‘ignored, because they did not understand, the effects of man in his relation to Nature — the sun-bleached landscapes, the farm with its neighbouring clump of gum trees, the fields that merge into wayward forests, the winding road with its bullock waggons, men and women toiling, horses and cattle’. It was to this neglect of ‘all the things that savour of man’ that he attributed the fact that ‘these early pictures do not arouse our sympathies, for it is precisely the pictures of things familiar to us, of homely subjects ... which most appeal...’. McCubbin did not have photography in mind, but his words define perfectly the appeal of genre photography, in which the ordinary routines and events of everyday life were captured by the camera. They also reveal that in selecting ‘all the things that savour of man’ certain unstated preconceptions operated. McCubbin’s vision of ‘homely subjects’, for example, excludes urban and industrial scenes, which presumably savoured of man in unacceptable ways.
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